NP van Wyk Louw-gedenklesing

Danie Marais

Die 35ste NP van Wyk Louw-gedenklesing, georganiseer deur prof Willie Burger van die Universiteit van Johannesburg, is vanjaar deur prof Mark Sanders gelewer. Prof Sanders is aan die Universiteit van New York se Department of Comparative Literature verbonde, maar is 'n gebore Suid-Afrikaner wat oa aan die Universiteit van Kaapstad studeer het. Benewens talle akademiese artikels is hy ook die outeur van die boek Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke University Press / University of Natal Press, 2002). Hy werk tans aan 'n boek met Engelse vertalings van Van Wyk Louw se essays getiteld N.P. van Wyk Louw: Writings on the Intellectual. In sy gedenklesing neem prof Sanders die spanning tussen die "intellektueel" en die "volk" in Van Wyk Louw se denke onder die loep. Meer inligting, asook die tekste van vorige gedenklesings, is beskikbaar by http://general.rau.ac.za/np.

Staan die kans om 'n eksemplaar van Oopgelate Kringe - NP van Wyk Louw Gedenklesings 1-11 te wen. Stuur 'n e-pos aan sharon@litnet.co.za en sê wie verantwoordelik was vir verlede jaar se gedenklesing.

"In die bus afgeluister": The intellectual in the city

Mark Sanders*

NP van Wyk Louw wrote widely about the intellectual. One of the first book-length studies of Louw's work, by Rena Pretorius, detailed his concept of the intellectual. The title of Pretorius's book, Die begrip Intellektueel by N.P. van Wyk Louw (1972), allows a play of two dimensions of the concept that, in English, are regularly reduced to one. Where an English rendering of the title of Pretorius's monograph may have read "the concept of the intellectual", "the concept 'intellectual'" would be correct but unconventional - the Afrikaans title, unburdened by a definite article, is mobile enough to traverse noun and adjective, figure and faculty. In fact, Pretorius observes, the coinage of the intellektueel as a noun in Afrikaans may be attributed to NP van Wyk Louw, who first used it in his essays in the 1930s, a time when it was usually used as an adjective or adverb (3, 8-9). For Pretorius, Louw's concept of the intellectual implied, more than anything else, a "houding", specifically a "lewenshouding", in the sense Louw introduced in his essay "'n Lewenshouding vir 'n moderne mens".

The concept intellectual thus connects the intellectual and intellectuality, and opens that connection to analysis. It opens a series of related although somewhat different questions: Who is intellectual? Who is an intellectual? What does an intellectual do that makes him or her an intellectual? The who may imply a position in social space - but one that is irreducible to strictly sociological categories. The question of what does he or she do? implies an attitude and activity which may, although analytically separable from it, be dependent upon an intellectual's sociality - or at least upon how he or she apprehends it. There is thus, in our usual thinking, considerable interplay between the two senses of the word intellectual: faculty and figure, act and actor. These two dimensions are in constant play in all of Louw's writings on the subject.

This is readily apparent in Louw's earlier essays, collected in his two books of 1939, Berigte te velde and Lojale verset. The title of the latter was, of course, a watchword bequeathed by Louw to successive generations of Afrikaans intellectuals, who inherited it with growing ambivalence. Nearly all of these early essays ponder, in one way or another, the intellectual: as faculty and as figure. Louw's essays of 1938, the year of the great symbolic Ossewatrek, and those of the following year, are particularly fertile. The figure of the intellectual implied in these writings is, typically, Louw himself - as he tried to align himself amid the Afrikaner-nationalist party politics and cultural-political activism of the period. This led him to define the intellectual according to a faculty and its activity. In "Volkskritiek" the intellectual is the berating conscience of the people. In "Die ewige trek" the intellectual is the mind that perceives and carefully weighs divergent courses of action open to the volk and its leaders.

In "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur" [Cultural leaders without culture], dating from February 1939 and published in Lojale verset, Louw turns to a classical example: the simile of the cave in book seven of Plato's Republic. Men are imprisoned in a cave and sit immobilised in chains on benches. They face a wall on which shadows of people and things are projected by an apparatus involving a fire and a screen of cloth. Knowing nothing else, the prisoners take these shadows for reality. One day a prisoner escapes and stumbles out into the bright sunlight. Dazzled at first, he gradually learns to see things as they are. Eventually he is able to look directly at the sun, and to perceive the idea of the good (agathou idéa) (Plato 517b). Acknowledging that the enlightened one may be reluctant to rejoin his fellows in the cave, Socrates makes doing so a duty. Instruction of the others in what is right and good is, so the simile runs, the duty of every educated man. Performing this duty is essential to the realisation of the state, insofar as it is to be founded on right and justice.

By invoking Plato's cave, Louw connects his meditations on the intellectual, or "kultuurmens", vis à vis cultural organisations to themes of the city (polis) and the citizen (polites). What, he asks, is the duty of the "man of culture" - the one who has undergone education or paideia - and who dwells in the city? Before it is Latinised as Republic, and rendered into Afrikaans as Staat, Plato's book bears the title Politeia - that which pertains to the polis. Politics, in a word. When Louw quotes from Plato, he translates polis (or city or state, if he is translating from an English translation) as stad¹. He insists, however, on a specificity of locale, of his own city - Kaapstad - even as the name of that place constantly echoes the "stad" wrought in the poetic imagination of Socrates and his interlocutors in Republic. He even insists on the particular way in which his city-dwellers will orient themselves toward the sun, toward what in Plato is the source of truth and of the good: "ek glo … aan geen abstrakte, algemeen menslike 'kultuurlewe' wat in Londen of Amsterdam of Sjanghai of Kaapstad dieselfde sal wees nie; ons stryd sowel as ons sonlig sal in ons eie êrens moet deurbreek" [I do not believe … in an abstract, general human "cultural life" that will be the same in London or Amsterdam or Shanghai; our struggle as well as our sunlight will have to break through somewhere in our own] (Versamelde prosa 1:79). Cultural life is idiomatic (eie). Neither the rival English and Dutch metropolises, nor the Chinese city of refuge, can provide direction for "us".

Yet Plato provides a handy allegory for Cape Town and for the "man of culture" who lives there. Louw, who does not hesitate to give the allegory yet another turn, makes the polis of Kaap-stad a synecdoche for the volk: "Maar Plato se onsterflike woorde geld hier vir ons soos vir die 'kultuurmens' van weinig ander volke" [But Plato's immortal words are valid here for us as they are for the "man of culture" of few other volke] (Versamelde prosa 1:79). Citizenship and membership of a volk are mixed in complex ways. His final paragraph is a peroration, in the form of a long quotation from Plato:

Julle moet dus om die beurt afgaan om saam met die ander mense van die stad te woon, en julle moet gewoond raak daaraan om die donker voorwerpe te sien; want as julle daaran gewoond is, sal julle duisend maal beter kan sien as dié wat daar woon; en julle sal weet wat elkeen van die beelde is en waarvan dit 'n beeld is, omdat julle die waarheid gesien het van wat skoon en reg en goed is. En dan sal die stad wat julle en ons s'n is 'n werklikheid van die nugter-wakker lewe word en nie 'n droom soos die meeste stede wat bestaan nie … (Plato 520c-d; qtd in Louw, Versamelde prosa 1:79). [You must thus go down in turn to live together with the other people of the city, and you must grow accustomed to see the dark objects; for if you are accustomed to doing so, you will be able to see a thousand times better than those who live there; and you will know what each of the images is and of what it is an image, because you have seen the truth of what is beautiful and right and good. And then the city that is yours and ours will become a reality of waking life and not a dream as most existing cities are …]

Politics in the narrow sense becomes the substance of Louw's writings of the late 1940s and 1950s - his vision of apartheid as a voortbestaan in geregtigheid [existing forth in justice] in the essays collected in Liberale nasionalisme, and as set out in his lectures at the University of Amsterdam. The idea of "right" or "justice" has, to be sure, already come to prominence by the late 1930s in Louw's trek festival play, Die dieper reg, and in "Die ewige trek" and "Volkskritiek," where an issue is made of the bestaansreg of the Afrikaans volk. It is, however, the later writings that more fully articulate a political vision or programme - how the polis will be brought about as a reality in South Africa. Recall, for instance, the strains of Louw's radio broadcast on the Tomlinson report: total racial separation can be realised, if there is the will to do so (Versamelde prosa 2:593-594). This is still a decade down the road. Even as they broach the idea of justice, "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur" and the other essays of the 1930s assembled in Lojale verset remain occupied with the place of the intellectual - in relation to the "other people of the city" - and in relation to the rulers of the land. This is why "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur" turns to Plato's prescription that the philosopher descend into the darkness in which the other people dwell.

Given this motivation, it is with great interest that, in the archive of the JS Gericke library at Stellenbosch University, one comes across a series of unpublished fragments of Louw entitled "In die bus afgeluister" [Overheard on the bus]. Although the fragments are not dated, they appear to come from the early 1940s. In the space provided for the owner's name on the cover of the red Croxley stenographer's notebook which contains them, Louw has written his address as "Sea-Girt, 2de Strand, Clifton". It is therefore probable that the fragments date from after November 1942, when he and Truida moved from the flea-infested beach shack, Trinity Hall, to Sea-Girt, their new house (Steyn 1:362). Louw would have taken the bus home from the University of Cape Town, where he lectured, via Sea Point, to Clifton. He would, therefore, have descended from the lofty slopes of Devil's Peak down into the city - from the rarefied precincts of Universiteit Kaapstad down and into the stad. Although Louw never made a great deal of his ties with the University - where for nineteen years he was passed over for promotion in the Education faculty - the claim is tacitly made that there is more of a relationship than a name, that the university has something to do with the city from which it takes its name, even if not all academics imagine that to be so.

In an introduction drafted for D du Plessis, the editor of a periodical (blad) (I have not been able to identify the person in question), Louw presents his sketches as excerpts from his notes on conversations and encounters aboard the Camps Bay bus. If Plato's cave was a place populated by the unenlightened, the bus as a microcosm of the city has, in addition, a specifically local significance. In a racially segregated polity, it is one of the few public places where a white person may, even if he or she is not quite comfortable doing so, rub shoulders with people of other population groups: "Busse in Kaapstad [is die] enigste plek in S.A. waar 'n mens monsters v[an] ons hele bevolking kan kry. Ek het geen beswaar daarteen dat ons so saam ry nie. Soms [is dit] lastig as 'n dronk nat[urel] met sy kop teen jou skouer leun - maar dis die mooiste geleentheid om jou land te leer ken" [Buses in Cape Town are the only place in S.A. where one can find samples of our entire population. I have no objection to our riding together in this way. Sometimes it is a nuisance when a drunk native leans his head against your shoulder - but it's the finest opportunity to get to know your country] (2.x.10). The excerpts, Louw writes, are specially chosen to "shed light on poli[tical] and social phenomena." Because they are "typical", and "manifest tendencies that extend beyond the discrete incidents" they describe, his "pictures" (prentjies) "may have significance for the statesman and the sociologist in S.A." In contrast to him, Louw believes, neither the statesman nor the sociologist "ever sees them, because [neither ever] rides on a bus". "When they move about," Louw adds, "(the ministers at least) it is always in separate (aparte) train carriages and in long, quiet motor cars."

The position of the intellectual is therefore quite different from that of the men of state. If the latter are to be true statesmen they have to be aware of happenings in the stad. For them, Louw is prepared to be a set of ears and eyes.

Drafts of two of Louw's "pictures" for "In die bus afgeluister" appear in the red notebook. Ideas for five more are jotted down there. The first of the two drafts, entitled "In vino veritas?", recounts a conversation in English between two men about Smuts and his relative beholdenness to English and Afrikaans sections of the white electorate. There is a fair sprinkling of bad language, which Louw does not spell out, and the general train of their drunken talk is anti-Afrikaner. The more strident of the pair refers, in the same breath, to "all the bl[oody] nigs & jiddles & Dutchmen". The speaker is aware, though, that he might be overheard by those whom he is defaming: "You never know when one of the b[astard]s is listening." Not particularly arresting as a slice of life, the first fragment nevertheless does, by including this remark, establish the fidelity of the one who listens in on their conversation.

Like the first fragment, the second of the two belongs to the genre of the urban sketch. It thus differs from Louw's usual didactic essays. It includes an element of low comedy that brings it in line with the journalism of The Wayfarer and the Man on the Spot, two columnists alluded to in the conversation in "In vino veritas?". Louw's authority depends, as does that of other practitioners of the genre, on a claim to be in place, or better still, under way.

The rubric "In die bus afgeluister" is a rich one. As a topos, the bus resembles the cave in Plato's simile. The passengers sit beside one another in rows, facing forward, just as the prisoners do in the cave. Their position is fixed. What the bus passengers are thought to observe is less fully sketched; although, of course, almost any element in the talk of the two tipplers may be regarded as a shadow mistaken for a thing in itself. Bus is also a semanteme. A contraction of omnibus, an old name for bus, it comes from the Latin omnibus, the dative plural of omnis, meaning "for all". The bus is thus a place where all of the city's people gather, or at least where their ways meet and paths cross. As Louw says, "Busse in Kaapstad [is die] enigste plek in S.A. waar 'n mens monsters v[an] ons hele bevolking kan kry" [Buses in Cape Town are the only place in S.A. where one can find samples of our entire population] (my emphasis). The bus is, in another sense, a counter-topos to the ossewa (ox wagon) and its progress "op die pad van Suid-Afrika" [on the path of South Africa] which was mythologised in the 1938 centenary trek and continued to be a powerful mobilising event for Afrikaner nationalists. The bus is a vehicle not of the country but of the city. Anyone may step aboard. The bus is public transport and, at least in the city of Cape Town in 1942, anybody may get on and off the bus at will. In 1939, trolley buses replaced trams on the route from Adderley Street to Sea Point. As long as one pays the fare, one may ride. One person's money is as good as another's.

Let us attend to the word afgeluister. The verb afluister (to overhear, to eavesdrop) is related to the verb afloer (to observe secretly, to spy on). In both these verbs, the prefix "af-" indicates a positioning to the side (para-) as well as a certain furtiveness. As the tippler says, "You never know when one of the b[astard]s is listening." The one who "luister af", unless unpractised, does not disclose the fact that he is doing so. The writer is incognito, taking notes in his red Croxley steno notebook. Eavesdropping on the conversation of his fellow passengers, he is not ostensibly the addressee of their talk - although he might be - but intercepts it and sounds out what sense it has for him. At the same time, he may also employ the talk that he hears as a kind of irony, even a self-ironising parabasis that could perhaps alter his own perception of himself. In the two sketches that Louw drafted (though not in all of the ones he outlined), he is a silent participant, though he is by no means a passive one.

The writer is "in die bus" (in the bus). It is this specific place, distinct from the private railway carriages and sleek automobiles of the ministers, that lends cogency to what is overheard. The latter may long for (verlang na) the bus, but they do not know (ken) it. Thus the writer, who rides the bus each day to and from work, has something unique to say. He is the one among the all. He is the one who travels in the vehicle that is "for all", while the rulers of the land impose an apartheid between themselves and the ruled.

The second of the fragments begins in medias res: "Langs my kom sit 'n naturel, nie te naby, nie te ver nie, volkome ongeërg" [A native comes and sits down next to me, not too close, not too far, with complete nonchalance]. The series of negatives expresses distance; it also expresses proximity. "Nie te naby, nie te ver nie" conveys an ambiguity: Is he near? Is he distant? The distance adopted by the fellow passenger is a tactful one; the one already seated cannot tell whether it is small or great. Yet he notes its immeasurability; it makes him search for language to convey the tact of the one who has come to join him. Bus passengers were not racially separated in Cape Town in 1942. City Tramways began to segregate its vehicles only in 1956, a few years after the Separate Amenities Act was passed. (Cape buses were desegregated again in 1977) (Bickford-Smith et al, 67, 205). The city as a whole had not yet been re-engineered through forced removals - of which the Tramway Road community of Sea Point is an example. The "native" was free to sit down beside NP van Wyk Louw if he liked.

"Volkome ongeërg", Louw adds, as if to contrast his own self-consciousness of racial distinctions with the artless tact of the other. The word ongeërg is an interesting one - not quite without "erg," which would be without deliberation, premeditation, or forethought. But indifferently, with nonchalance, with no apparent performance. Erg, cognate with the German Arg, comes from an Old High German word for agitation or excitedness, stemming perhaps originally from the Greek orche sthai - to dance. He does not make a song and dance about it. Or break a sweat. The "native" plays it cool - which is, of course, in itself a performance, as Louw will show us before long.

What of the word naturel? One the one hand it is a respectable word, compared, say, to nig, and to kaffir, which is the epithet that will be slung at Louw's fellow passenger in a just a few minutes. Native, the English equivalent of naturel, is the word used by liberals - for instance in Hoernlé's South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (1939) - and in official discourse of the segregation era: Native Affairs Department, Natives' Representative Council, and so on. Naturel is not supposed to be a pejorative. By using this word, Louw establishes a certain neutrality - to the extent that any word could ensure this - but, more accurately, the word is a token (like A, B, C, or D) used to categorise someone racially. In itself it says nothing of interest about the one categorised. This tokening is so ingrained that, in a passage I quoted a few moments ago from his notes for an introduction to "In die bus afgeluister", Louw employs the abbreviation "nat." instead of spelling out naturel in full. Once he has dealt the token, Louw has a stable point from which the tact of the fellow passenger, his coolness and other phenomena may be measured. It allows Louw to gauge the extent of his divergence from type - and in the end to stage his reversion to it.

For it is his type that already occupies a seat on the bus: "Op die bank voor my sit reeds 'n ander, netjies aangetrek ... met ... 'n bottel ... in die hand, toegedraai in koerant maar hoegenaamd nie verberg nie" [On the seat in front of me already sits another, neatly dressed; he got on with what is clearly a bottle in his hand, wrapped in newspaper but by no means concealed]. Eliding the racial index, 'n ander indicates that, whatever differences there are, the one and the other will share a basic similarity, an essence even. They occupy the same space in the periodic table, and will, ultimately, react in the same fashion. There is a foreshadowing. And, indeed, "Die kêrel wat langs my sit is ook baie netjies geklee en het so bietjie-bietjie baard; hy het 'n donkerrooi nekdoek aan met wit stippels" [The fellow that sits next to me is also very neatly clothed and has a little bit of a beard; he wears a dark red neckerchief with white dots]. The details Louw provides are signs of African urbanisation and urbanity, even of a dandyism embracing British and American fashion. The latter would be celebrated in the pages of Drum in the 1950s. The adoption of metropolitan styles spread with a consumer culture facilitated by increased income, as black men replaced white men who left their jobs to fight during World War Two. A fact of the time, its description is surely also a stereotype - a new edition, perhaps, of the "jollie Hotnot" portrayed by the early Afrikaans writers, as discussed by Jakes Gerwel in his seminal study. If an attention to striking dress is not always a part of this tradition, the reference to alcohol (the "hopeless alcoholism" to which one finds reference even in as recent a work as Breytenbach's Dog Heart) must surely be. Louw's sketch strains under the weight of hackneyed colonial genres and a set of stock characters that compete for their places on the page of his notebook. He is a relative latecomer, and they will not allow him through without a struggle.

A fourth figure makes its entrance: the conductor. Like the "naturel," he also comes "langs" (see passage below). The word langs is, as we will observe, an important one - if we connect it to the af-, the para-, of eavesdropping, and to what the "native" will say when he has finished with the conductor.

The presence of the conductor is indispensable to the continuation of the performance - which is, for Louw (who is, for the moment, taken in by it), not quite a performance - because he identifies with the one "langs" him and wishes to be him. He does not want it to be a performance, if that means artifice instead of artlessness. The one next to him is also Louw's double, just as Raka is for Koki in the long poem that Louw published in 1941. Raka, however, behaves, but because he "cannot think", he can presumably also not perform. The fellow passenger is thus a more plausible semblable. What happens on the bus takes place in slow motion, with its tempo dictated by the "naturel". It gives rise to an identification that the jostling genres rudely fight to spoil:

Die kondukteur kom langs. Die naturel langs my begin hom baie stadig en rustig regtrek om te betaal: lig sy knie op, trek die broekspyp hoog op, en toon 'n heldergroen sokkie wat netjies aan 'n ophouer vassit. Hy werk so langsaam dat die kondukteur al by mense voorlangs knip en eers toe almal klaar is, terugkom. My bankgenoot is nog besig: uit die sokkie het hy 'n wit sakdoek getrek en dié vou hy nou omstandig oop; binnein is 'n paar banknote: ek sien 'n vyfpondnoot en 'n paar ponde. Hy haal een van die ponde uit, blaas 'n paar keer daarop, skiet-skiet dit met sy pinkie en presenteer dit dan.

"Why don't you spit on it?"

Stilte.

"How far are you going?"

"Seepunt. Enkel."

Ek is verbaas dat hy Afr[ikaan]s praat.

"Haven't you got smaller?"

"Ek wil Seepunt toe gaan, en ek betaal."

"You bl- kaffir ..." mompel die kond[ukteur,] maar hy begryp seker genoeg Afr[ikaans] om te weet wat Seepunt beteken.

Hier word gehandhaaf, dag ek; en 'n bietjie daarvoor gely. Hoekom het ek self maar ewe laf Camps Bay i.p.v. K[amps]baai gesê?

[The conductor comes along. The native next to me begins very slowly and calmly to get himself ready to pay: lifts his knee, draws his trouser leg high up, and displays a bright green sock neatly attached to a suspender. He works so unhurriedly that the conductor is already clipping the tickets of people down in front and only returns when he is finished with everyone else. My seat-mate is still busy: from out of the sock he has drawn a white handkerchief and this he folds open ceremoniously; inside are some banknotes: I see a five-pound note and a few pounds. He takes out one of the pounds, blows on it a couple of times, flicks it with his little finger, and then presents it.

"Why don't you spit on it?"

Silence.

"How far are you going?"

"Sea Point. One way."

I am astonished that he speaks Afrikaans.

"Haven't you got smaller?"

"I want to go to Sea Point. And I'm paying."

"You bl- kaffir ..." mumbles the conductor, but surely he understands enough Afrikaans to know what Seepunt means.

Here is a holding of one's own, I think to myself; and suffering a little for it. Why did I prove a coward in the same situation and say Camps Bay instead of Kampsbaai?]

"Ek is verbaas dat hy Afrikaans praat." Louw registers his surprise, his astonishment, after his fellow passenger has made his request: "Seepunt. Enkel." Why is he astonished? Because on buses to Sea Point and Camps Bay, nobody transacts in Afrikaans - despite it having become an official language in 1925. It is, of course, also wartime, and to insist on using Afrikaans in parts of the city where English is the dominant language may connote anti-British sentiment. It may even be construed as unpatriotic.

Louw's seat-mate continues to reply in Afrikaans. And he does so abruptly: "Ek wil Seepunt toe gaan, en ek betaal" [I want to go to Sea Point. And I'm paying]. This stubbornness, his repeated use of Afrikaans, because it is his right, even when the city official insists on English, is what excites the writer. It is the pass in the story that he most wants to reach; it is what he most powerfully invests - even if, once he gets there, he does not remain for long - for it is a hazardous place.

When we examine the page in Louw's notebook, we see that this brief exchange has been amplified after first being written down. Dialogue is added and the effects on the one who overhears it are developed. The result is that several paths of identification make themselves felt - and "felt" is the right word, for the paths are paths of suffering, even martyrdom. The reaction that he writes down first is "Hier word gehandhaaf, dag ek; en 'n bietjie daarvoor gely." The connotations of the word "handhaaf" - to uphold, to maintain, to defend in the face of threat, to hold one's own, to insist on one's due - in the Afrikaner-nationalist lexicon exceed the meanings that I have just given. We have a Handhawersbond, which split from the Broederbond in 1930, and the motto of the FAK, founded in 1929, is "Handhaaf en Bou", a phrase echoed for several generations of Afrikaans schoolchildren in "Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika." What is being "gehandhaaf" is Afrikaner cultural identity. Handhaaf is a big, heavy nationalist word - and, given the tenor of "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur", not one with which one would immediately expect NP van Wyk Louw to have associated himself - or at least not unconditionally. But here he is - the poet and didactic essayist and occasional playwright - writing in a genre in which he is relatively unpractised. And that genre dictates a certain popular Afrikaner-nationalist sentimentality. It is, given the overtones of the word, almost incredible that a "naturel" would be said to "handhaaf" - except if the word conveyed something about Louw himself rather than about the "other". And this is precisely what it conveys, when Louw adds: "Hoekom het ek self maar ewe laf Camps Bay ipv K[amps]baai gesê?" His self-acknowledged cravenness is in direct contrast to the suffering of the other - the one who, if truth be told, is prepared to "handhaaf" his right to conduct public business in Afrikaans, and thus to "handhaaf" the language. He is, to all intents and purposes, a "handhawende Afrikaner", one of the examples of usage given in the HAT (Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal). Louw wishes that he could be (like) him; even suffer as he suffers.²

A second path of identification is more consequential. Louw's wish to be (like) him is intensified by the second amplification he makes to the exchange. When his seat-mate says "ek betaal", the conductor replies with what to Louw himself, one assumes, would be an unacceptable racism, and which the conductor himself half suppresses, or at least utters sotto voce: "'You bl- kaffir ...' mompel die kond[ukteur]." The mumbling Englishman turns the handhawende Afrikaner into a kaffir. Hence Louw, when he passes for an Englishman on the bus, is not merely letting down the volk, but is a crypto-kaffir. His deeper fear is that, should he stand up to the conductor, he will be called out as a kaffir, that the illusion that he is any different will evaporate … kaffirphobia - fear of the kaffir within, the part of me that, despite myself, identifies with the "naturel" sitting next to me. And, as Breytenbach emphasised in "A Note on Apartheid" in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, I do not want this even though I want it. So I vote for apartheid - to stop him from sitting down beside me and reminding me that I am no better than and no different from him.

The rest of the sketch is bitterly anticlimactic. It brings the bench-fellow down to size - assimilating him to the "other" native on the bench in front. But before this happens, there is another, hardly believable, moment.

Once the conductor has laboriously counted out nearly a pound's worth of change, and has walked off, Louw hears the "native" say - to himself, but surely also for the benefit of the surrounding passengers, who are now his audience: "Ek is 'n Vrystater en ôrlaam" [I am a Free Stater and an old hand]. The last word is spelt in an unusual way - perhaps to render what Louw hears as an idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word oorlams - with a kappie on the single o, a long aa and the final s elided. "Dit verklaar vir my die handhaaf," Louw adds.

Does it explain, though? Not really. Or not a great deal. Again we have a statement - this time in the mouth of the "naturel" - that claims for him a cultural identity that is radically split - between one that would be equally or more readily available to a white person (Vrystater), and another that a white person would be unlikely to claim. Given the racist overtones of the word in the recent past, to find someone of colour describe himself as "oorlams" is virtually unbelievable. Yet perhaps it is not impossible. Although it means "sly", "cheeky" or "uppity", oorlams also means "acculturated" - acculturated into Dutch (and later Afrikaans) rather than Anglicised - and historically the word was used to refer to various groups of people of colour throughout South Africa and parts of Namibia. The word itself is an etymological curiosity. It comes from the Malay orang lama. Orang means "human being"; lama means long. Orang lama means, in a literal sense, someone who has been around a long time, as opposed to a green, raw individual. Lank in die land would be an idiomatic Afrikaans rendering. Oorlams thus adds to the series of langses than punctuate the piece. Oor-langs - the orang/fellow next to me? (Or the ear next to me? The ear of the other?) Generating this near homophone, the word oorlams feeds an obsession with proximity and distance. (Which of them is the real mimic man?) For the time being, it holds sway in this space of Unheimlichkeit.

There is a superficial irony, of course, if one takes lank in die land in its temporal literalness - for, compared with the native alongside of him, Louw is the Johnny-come-lately. The word oorlams also reveals that Afrikaans, the language that is to be "gehandhaaf", is a hybrid tongue - that it is a tongue of the "naturel" who is always already "oorlams". The word, after all, did not come from the Netherlands.

(Louw, incidentally, was quite fond of adopting certain Cape-isms. One that comes to mind is olanna, as in groot olannas, which means an important person, a big shot, and comes, as he explains somewhere in a letter, from Hollander. Significantly, olanna is a word that refers to one in authority, and when Louw uses it to refer to his superiors, he is playing with a more profound subordination and subjugation.)

Yet, despite a linguistic history to which Louw is by no means oblivious, the handhaaf of the native still needs to be explained. It, and the very fact that the native speaks Afrikaans, is astonishing. There is either a massive forgetting of history here - or, as I have been suggesting, a massively disavowed identification.

That the latter is more likely is given support by the context of another appearance in the series "In die bus afgeluister" of the word verbaas. The fifth and last of the ideas for additional sketches reads: "Iemand wat verbaas is dat ek my dogtertjie Afr[ikaans] leer!!!" [Somebody that is astonished that I am teaching my little daughter Afrikaans!!!]. (Louw is being a father by remote control; following his divorce in 1936, his first wife, Joan Wessels, and his two daughters moved to Windhoek. He may be referring to his younger daughter, Anna Cornelia, or Nakkie, who was born in 1933.) The triple exclamation marks that follow indicate that one ought to be "verbaas" not at the "handhaaf" of the language but rather at the verbaas-ness of the anonymous "iemand". Yet, as one sometimes forgets, the Louw family anglicised and sent their boys to SACS.

But the minute that "Ek is 'n Vrystater en ôrlaam" explains things for Louw, it explains nothing - or, it appears to explain nothing because another, simpler, explanation is nearer at hand and is wrapped in newspaper. Like the "other" native, his seat-mate is inebriated - the manner of speech and not its content is an explanation: "En van die praat kom ek agter dat hy al iets in het. En nou sien hy wat die ander vóór ons in die hand hou." [And from his speech I detect that he has had a little. And now he sees what the other one in front of us has in his hand.] From handhaaf to a bottle that the other is holding "in die hand". A sleight of hand. Louw has been manoeuvred into thinking that his bench-mate and semblable has spoken up for his rights - when, all along, it has been drink that has been talking. Dutch courage. All Louw's hopes - or projective identifications - have gone up in a puff of smoke - in a puff of Cape Smoke.

The last part of the fragment is devoted mainly to the efforts of "my Vrystater" to purchase the other's bottle from him, offering him as much as five shillings for it. His bargaining is cut short when the bus reaches Sea Point and he has to get off.

Louw's final observation is of a loss of tact, of a making of excessive contact - and it is here that women make their only appearance. And they are white women. They are the ones at risk when the native leaves the bus - "val-val teen twee wit vroue wat naaste aan (he had written langs but changed it) die paadjie sit".

It is time to return from Louw's bus to Plato's cave. In it, as in William Kentridge's Shadow Procession³, where torn-up pieces of paper and objects such as a pair of scissors resemble people and their possessions when their shadows are projected, an illusion assumes a life of its own. Louw and his seat-mate are like the prisoners in the cave. Louw sees a handhaaf but, as he grows to realise, it is an illusion. The fact that the man is a "Vrystater en ôrlaam" does not verklaar - by bringing things into aletheia - but is part of the illusion. Yet Louw is taken in by this shadow play, and accepts distinctions from which conclusions follow: Vrystater and oorlams, therefore handhaaf. Astonishment is dispelled for a moment through racial typing. Then, when he sees that the man is inebriated, he thinks that he has seen what the shadow is a shadow of. But has he? Is alcoholism/sobriety not just an alternative scale for racial typing? Who can say?

Many implications flow from this sketch for the idea of the intellectual or "man of culture" as imagined by Louw in "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur" and which comes down to him and to us from Plato. The figure of the philosopher from Book Seven of the Republic, although so rich in import, particularly if detached from the details of the political system imagined in the book as a whole, has its limits. It presupposes a philosopher who has seen truth, the light for which the sun is the ultimate source, and of which it is the figure, who has seen what is right and good, and who can go back and sit with his erstwhile bench-mates and make distinctions of which they are incapable. Louw embraced this model in "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur", setting it in his polis, in his "stad", under his sun. We see, from his sketch for "In die bus afgeluister", however, that discriminating between shadows and what they stand for is not necessarily within reach of the "man of culture" either. Demon drink is no final explanation at all. If the bench-mate has deeper motives for his actions, they remain opaque. So instead we have a "man of culture" who, in an uncontrolled fantasy of identification, for a few moments at least, does not quite know who he is: Is he a (on)handhawende Afrikaner, or is he a kaffir?

In order to discover these dynamics, one must board Louw's bus. Plato's cave has no inkling of them, unless one interprets the competition among the prisoners to discriminate among shadows as a sign of a more pervasive rivalry - which, in terms of René Girard's schema, adopted frequently by JM Coetzee in Giving Offense, is a mimetic one: I want to be he, because I desire what I imagine he desires. There is a doubling. Koki is drawn into this by Raka. Louw is drawn in by the "naturel". The object of desire is displaced - handhaaf, lyding - and may, finally (if there is a finally), be the white women (plural, always?) whom the "naturel" brushes up against as he leaves the bus.

But there is another way of reading the fragment. What Louw prizes about the bus is that it is a space unlike any other in South Africa - it is, being an omnibus, "for all". And, to a certain extent, it is a free-for-all - "my Vrystater", Louw calls his companion, reiterating the conjunction of freedom and polis (here: state). In a free state or city, there must be free citizens. On the bus the rules do not apply in quite the same way as elsewhere. That is why Louw finds it such a powerful topos.⁴ The "bus" takes us from Plato's cave, and the Republic, and light and truth, to another topos frequently found in Plato.

That topos is the agora, an open space and not a closed one - the fabled marketplace of Plato's Socrates - celebrated in the early dialogues, especially in the Apology, which recounts the trial of Socrates. In the Apology Socrates says that since he is unschooled in the formal language of the courtroom, he will speak in the plain language of the agora (Plato 17c). It is, he says, only just that he be heard in his own tongue. Socrates is the figure of irony, eironeia, dissembled ignorance - he knows the language of the court well enough. When Louw's fellow rider reminds the conductor that "[e]k betaal", he is letting him know where they are - in the marketplace, where nobody is entitled to lord it over another; and any assertion of superiority will be put sorely to the test. Such assertions will even be provoked - through deliberate and excessive temporising, for instance - in order to be tested.

In this context the profession to be an Afrikaans speaker, and the entitlement to be addressed in Afrikaans, may just as well be a fiction.

It is the right to that fiction, and to fiction in general, to dissembling, and ultimately to the secret, that Jacques Derrida associates with democracy in his last book, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2003):

… is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an indecidable limit. There is something of a democratic republic as soon as this right is exercised (91-92).

In a number of his works, Louw groped towards this - seeking out a dialogue in Die Huisgenoot, for example, in "Die oop gesprek", in the 1950s. Yet, there, for lack of interest, he had at times to simulate one.

Louw's "In die bus afgeluister" was never published. Perhaps he never got around to speaking to D du Plessis. We do not know. The fragment nevertheless gives us an impression of what it might have entailed for Louw, the "man of culture", to descend into the "cave" and into "the "city" - a duty that he certainly embraced all of his life. It also shows how, when the intellectual does so, he is as helpless as the next person to tell the shadows from what they are shadows of; he is, in sum, as a consequence, just as incapable of discerning the truth and what is right and just.

This is, however, not a lesson that he will ever fully acknowledge; his mind, like those of most of his contemporaries, will be captivated by the troupe of shadow players - black/white, native/European, and so forth - when it is other things that might show him his way out of the cave, towards a free state, a state of being unhemmed by the imperative to handhaaf any particular cultural or racial identity.

Will the intellectual always struggle at the level of "menslikheid" (humanity) - when the presence of the other, with all attendant identifications, disrupts the population (bevolking) thinking of the social engineers and their fearful publicists, including Louw, who writes in "Kultuurleiers" of the Afrikaans volk as lying "in between the powerful English culture and the black mass of Africa" (swart massa van Afrika) (Versamelde prosa 1:79)? Plato assumes that the philosopher will know the difference between shadows and what they are shadows of - but when the intellectual actually descends, we see that he cannot tell, that he is deceived by appearances (clothing, language), by his own categories, and most of all, about himself. For a moment, he has no idea who he is. Is he NP van Wyk Louw of "Sea Girt, 2nd Beach, Clifton"? Or is he a "bl- kaffir?" He has to choose, as did the white voters who, disdaining "kafferwerk" when the Carnegie investigators asked them, elected Malan, disavowing all similitude to their bench-fellows - what, in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, I termed a foreclosure of folded-together-ness in human-being.

Plato writes about competition among the prisoners in differentiating the shapes of the shadows. This is the competition that whites will win when they set themselves apart from other South Africans. We see from Louw's sketch how the intellectual, although superficially against apartheid, may be powerless to elude this game. How, then, can he profess, as he did in so many of his writings, to be the arbiter of right and good?

If we return to the idea of the intellectual as faculty and figure, we see that those elements are interlinked. Faculty and figure imply each other in turn. If you are a person who travels on the bus, perhaps you will adopt the ironic mode - exposure of error, of pretension to knowing the truth and what is just and right. Perhaps you will be open to question. Louw certainly realises this when he contemplates his series of sketches as a counterweight to the isolation of the ministers and social scientists (a healthy one, considering the professional background of Geoffrey Cronjé and HF Verwoerd). But, it would appear, that is not exactly what he does (or recollects doing) when he is on the bus. He finds identification with the oorlams ironist momentarily, but it is intolerable because the ironist is a naturel. So Louw plays the philosopher, back in the cave with the dupes, better than whom he professes to see. He knows the truth, he thinks. He can clarify.

But if we are still in the dark, so is he.

Works cited
Benezra, Neal, Staci Boris, and Dan Cameron. William Kentridge. Chicago/New York: Museum of Contemporary Art / New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001.
Bickford-Smith, Vivian, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Nigel Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999.
Breytenbach, Breyten. Dog Heart (a Travel Memoir). Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1998.
-. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. London: Faber, 1984.
Coetzee, JM. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques. "The Retrait of Metaphor." Enclitic 2.2 (1978):1-33.
-. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Gerwel, Jakes. Literatuur en apartheid: Konsepsies van "Gekleurdes" in die Afrikaanse roman tot 1948. Bellville: University of the Western Cape, 1988.
Louw, NP van Wyk. "In die bus afgeluister." Holograph Notebook 2.X.10. JS Gericke Library, University of Stellenbosch.
-. Versamelde Prosa. 2 vols. Cape Town: Tafelberg/Human & Rousseau, 1986.
Plato. Apology. Translated Benjamin Jowett. The Dialogues of Plato. Vol 1. New York: Random House, 1937. 401-23.
-. Republic. Translated AD Lindsay. London: Dent, 1935.
Pretorius, Rena. Die Begrip Intellektueel by N.P. Van Wyk Louw. Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1972.
Sanders, Mark. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002.
Steyn, JC. Van Wyk Louw: 'n Lewensverhaal. 2 vols. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1998.

* The author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (University of Natal Press, 2002), Mark Sanders is Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, and Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University.

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Footnotes 1 Judging from the particular phrasing of the passages he quotes from Plato, it is likely that Louw was translating from AD Lindsay's 1909 English translation of the Republic, reissued in a 1935 Dent and Dutton edition that Louw owned. I thank Hanna Botha for finding this information for me.
2 In a remark in "Kultuurleiers sonder kultuur" Louw writes that culture "is also powerful, but with the power of the martyr rather than the hangman" (Versamelde prosa 1:73).
3 See Benezra et al, 63, 137.
4 As Derrida reminds us in "The Retrait of Metaphor", the word for bus in modern Greek is metaphora. For now, let this be an emblem for the topic power of bus.



LitNet: 01 November 2005

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